This generation is one that is used to textual communication. In a previous article, we talked about a study that found 48 percent of 18-24 year olds believe text messaging is just as meaningful as an actual conversation with the person on the phone. A lot of your younger customers may prefer to communicate through text, and if you don’t have an option for them, you could be missing out on their business. If a customer browsing your website has a question about a product and the answers aren’t there, they may move on.
LiveChat offers a real-time live chat software tool for e-commerce sales and support. LiveChat is being used by businesses in a wide variety of industries, according to LiveChat spokesperson Szymon Klimczak:
- startups (Animoto, SmugMug, SproutSocial)
- online retailers (ModCloth, ASOS, Beachmint, PromGirl, Quiksilver)
- hosting providers (MediaTemple, Lunarpages, JaguarPC, Site5, iWeb)
- education/universities (UCLA, Stanford, UNF)
- software (Adobe, Kaspersky Lab)
- hardware (Asus, Acer, Roku, Netgear)
- tourism (HomeExchange, AirAsia)
The cost of the software goes from $36 a month for one agent, to $39-$59/month for larger teams, with discounts available for longer subscriptions.
In terms of best practices when implementing customer service chat on your website, here are some tips:
- Make your chat pages consistent with the rest of your site. You want your customers to have a uniform experience.
- Your analytics should be able to tell you when customers are visiting your site the most, and thus, when you need agents available.
- Your agents should have a shared knowledge-base available to them, with canned answers for the fastest response to common queries, and customer history data, if possible.
- Agents should have strong language skills. They should avoid jargon and typos when chatting with customers.
- In chat, even more so than on the telephone, it’s important for your agents to let the customer know what you’re doing and if you’re not going to be writing back to them for a minute or two while you deal with any issues they may have. You’re bound to lose them if they’re sitting there without a clue what’s going on on the other end and no indication from the agent that their problem or query is being responded to.
- Have agents focus on solving any problem fast and in one session.
LiveChat has a lot more on agent etiquette on their blog.
Do you have experience with customer service chat What have you learned from implementing it Did it increase your profits Let us know in the comments!